Shards
by Captain Evermind
Summary: Charts the lives and friendship of Hawkeye and Trapper John, from college right through Korea. As Hawkeye contemplates these shattered memories, he comes to realise that, although Trapper leaves, he is never truly gone.
1. The Last of the Mohicans

In Crapapple Cove, Maine, Benjamin Franklin Pierce (named after an explorer and a president) is six years old, and his father reads him "The Last of the Mohicans." His father cooks bacon and eggs in the little kitchen every morning, while Benjamin sits by the window to pull on his grey school socks, and watches his breath blow in icy plumes like a dragon's, watches Jack Frost trace silver shards across the window pane. He listens to the bacon sizzling in the pan, and feels warm and safe as he hears the rain tumbling on the roof, the dogs barking wetly in the yard outside.

Benjamin Pierce is six, and he comes home from school in a rush of wool-scarf -flying, pink-cheeked jubilation, and clatters up the stairs to kiss his mother. Sometimes, if she is well and smiling, he sits with her in the big double bed, and she reads to him from big, leather-bound, gold-leaf books of Shakespeare, Wilde, Hemingway, Tolstoy, and Tennyson. But she never reads him "The Last of the Mohicans." That belongs to Dad. He sometimes tells Ben with a twinkle in his eyes that it is the only book he has ever read. Most days though, Mother is too tired to play, so Ben clatters downstairs again (fourteen stairs, he counts them every time) and helter-skelters outside without his mittens to build snow forts with Tommy, and play soldiers and Indians. Tommy is Chingachgook, with a toy sword that his big brother made for him, and Ben is Hawkeye, with a slingshot made from an old strip of leather. Sometimes, Dickie Barber plays with them too, and he has a real gun that his Dad bought him in town, which fires plastic bullets and bangs like a real soldier's gun. Ben rolls snowballs with Tommy, and they scale the big pine tree to their secret hut to throw them at Tommy's sister Esmae.

In Boston, Massachusetts, Johnny McIntyre is nearly (but not quite) seven, and he goes to church on Sunday swinging from his big brother's arm. Michael is older than him, ten now, but Johnny is nearly seven, and one day he will be bigger than Mike. His mother stays at home with the new baby, and Kathy is too little yet to come to church, because she's only two, while Johnny is six, going on seven. He used to ride to church sitting on his Father's shoulders, but now he is almost the oldest, so he walks along the pavement instead, only running a little bit to catch up with Michael, and it is Adam now who rides on Dad's shoulders. Johnny likes Sundays best, because he doesn't have to go to school, and after Mass, Dad takes them all to the park, and he is allowed to take his shoes off and paddle in the lake, and Michael chases the ducks to make Adam laugh, and then Dad gets out a football and teaches them all how to pass and kick. Johnny loves football. He is fast, faster than Dad, and he can kick almost as far as Mike can. On the way back , Dad stops to get a loaf of bread for lunch, and the boys are allowed to choose something from the bakery. When it is Johnny's turn, he always chooses raisin buns with creamy white icing, and he licks his fingers all the way home. After lunch, he plays in the yard with Mike and Adam, but they don't let Kathy play, because she's too young, and anyway, she's a girl. Kathy doesn't mind. She sits in front of the fire with Mommy, and reads picture books to the baby. (She can't really read, she just pretends to, but Johnny can, because he's at school now. Sometimes, if he's feeling really nice, he'll read to her and show her what the words are, but mostly he just plays outside because books are girly.)

Johnny McIntyre is six, going on seven, and he plays in the garden with his brothers while his mother cooks roast chicken for Sunday dinner.

Hawkeye Pierce is six years old when his mother dies, and his father reads him "The Last of the Mohicans."


	2. A Beginning

New Hampshire, 1939. A foggy morning in mid-September, Dartmouth vs. Androscoggin, just a mid-season practise run. On the wing is young Hawkeye Pierce, not yet eighteen, just out of high school. Not much of a passer, not much speed, but a fighter. His opposite number is Dartmouth's find of the season – first year in college and already captain. Tall, rake thin, elegant; effortless, long-legged running gait; sandy curls, mocking grin.

It is this grin which is particularly infuriating Hawkeye Pierce, the heart and soul of the Androscoggin's motley team, whose combined efforts 20 minutes into the second half could perhaps be best described as enthusiastic rather than stunning ball play. A strange intervention of fate, and Bugsy Carter successfully intercepts his first pass of the game. He tosses a wild one somewhere in the direction of the wing, and Hawkeye springs into action. Skinny arms scrabble in the mud, and he emerges from a tussle with the ball still in hand. Seeing the way ahead clear, the Hawk grins, head down, and sprints for the line. Out of nowhere, something hits him, and Hawkeye finds himself buried beneath several pounds worth of skinny Boston winger. He twists angrily in his opponent's grasp, and regains his feet in time to catch a glimpse of the infuriating grin as his opposite spins a perfect pass to the centre and racks up another seven points for Dartmouth.

Another pass, and another brilliant tackle, and Hawkeye is once again left glaring after a silver-footed Mercury with a mocking laugh and sparkling devil's eyes. Yet another, and Hawkeye again crashes to the ground beneath the Dartmouth winger, and in desperation lashes out with an angry fist which strikes his opponent square in the jaw. The tackler, showing more spirit than the Hawk had anticipated, retaliates, and he grins as he lands a bruising punch below Hawkeye's left cheekbone.

Later, in the changing room, a limping and bloodied Androscoggin side peel off their sodden sweaters with groans of agony. Hawkeye Pierce stands naked and dripping from the shower in front of a rust-spotted mirror and examines a beautiful black eye, and what he suspects to be several cracked ribs, though it is difficult to be certain as their class has not yet progressed past "acne" in 'Hobson's Medical Encyclopaedia'. The door in the mirror reflection opens, and the young Dartmouth winger enters, clean-shirted and fresh-faced with his curls only slightly damp, with only a split lip to remember the match by. He proceeds to shake hands, congratulate them all on a bloody good game and a bloody good punch up, and invite them all for a couple of drinks in the clubroom.

They have the couple of drinks, then several more, and the Boston winger is introduced as one John Francis Xavier McIntyre. The game is lauded generously, the Androscoggin team congratulated for their little short of miraculous win, and the Dartmouth side congratulated for the altogether more substantial honour of having soundly thrashed not only the entire opposition, but also two back-benchers, a coach, a referee, and several bystanders. Another round of drinks, and Hawkeye realises that he has forgotten to leave on the bus with the rest of the team, and returns to the Dartmouth campus to crash on the floor of Johnny McIntyre's dorm room. The next morning they awake from an alcohol induced stupor, jump together into the college lake, and return to the dormitory for a breakfast of black coffee and peanut butter. On such things are lasting friendships forged.

It is September 1939. Britain and her allies have just declared war on Germany.


	3. Partners in Crime

1940, Hawkeye and Johnny chase girls together in their spare time, fill Dean Lodge's office with jelly and icecream, and start a riot in an Ohio bath house. Hawkeye lives just off the grounds of his college in a falling-down shack which his classmates christen 'the Swamp', and John McIntyre is the only Irish Catholic in Massachusetts ever to keep a distillery in his bedroom.

1941, and Johnny takes to attending the Androscoggin lectures instead of his own. He acquires from somewhere a beaten-up guitar, and sits on the roof of Dartmouth nursing college inventing rude lyrics to "God Bless America". Hawkeye mails Dean Lodge a nervous system after his first autopsy, and travels to Boston for the Christmas break. He charms Ruth McIntyre with his blue-eyed innocence and becomes an indispensable aid to Xavier McIntyre's obsessive football following. He meets Johnny's brothers, Michael, Adam, and Luke, and begins a casual but lasting flirtation with his sister Kathy. As a seasonal gift, Dean Lodge receives a trailer full of kidneys, and a Christmas pudding.

1942, and the pattern is reversed. Johnny spends a lazy summer in Maine, and is instructed in the art of catching lobsters by Daniel Pierce. On the return journey, he discovers an old flame from high school escorting her grandmother to Boston, and traps her in the toilet of the train until she agrees to be his date to the Winter Carnival. This event gives rise to a multitude of ribald jokes on the part of Hawkeye, and John McIntyre becomes something of a college legend, and, in the immortal words of one Duke Forrest, 'the only man ever to get a piece in the ladies can of the Boston-Maine express.' The girl, Louise, doesn't seem to mind, and becomes a regular cheerleader at the Dartmouth football games. Johnny acquires a new nickname.

1943, and Hawkeye begins his medical residency at Boston General. He shares a flat with Trapper John and Duke Forrest, and they live off the bones of their arses. Together, Hawkeye and Trapper swim the Charles River in a fit of drunken enthusiasm, hold a pagan bonfire ceremony in the middle of their flat, and send Dean Lodge a farewell gift of appendixes in custard cream. They move their way systematically through most of the girls in Boston, and Trapper dates Louise regularly on his nights off. Kathy moves in with them for a while, and she and Hawk go steady, until one night she leaves, and is replaced by a young intern by the name of Carlye Breslin. Trapper proposes to Lu at midnight on the 24th of December, and her parents are quite satisfactorily horrified.

1944, Lu and Trapper are married. Trap's brother Mike is best man, and Hawkeye stands beside Luke and Adam in his dad's old tuxedo and tries not to giggle at the expressions of Louise's relatives. After the ceremony, they all drink too much, and Lu's Aunty Marge faints at Duke and Hawkeye's musical rendition of Trapper's more memorable exploits. Carlye has a row with Hawk after he flirts outrageously with Kathy at the reception, and Trapper's parents give him and Lousie the down payment on a little house in the suburbs. During the honeymoon, Hawkeye and Duke slope moodily from one bar to another wondering why Trap had to go and get married anyway, and how come they manage to get their faces slapped so often.

Not long afterwards, Lu and Trapper move out, Duke goes home to Georgia, and Hawkeye sulks for days. Carlye complains that he cares about his work more than her, and walks out on him. Hawkeye returns to Crabapple Cove, and helps his dad catch lobsters. He receives a single letter from Trapper John. He neglects to reply, but he keeps the photograph of the baby girl in the white christening gown sleeping on her Daddy's knee.

August 1945, America bombs Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and World Peace is declared.


	4. A Bar in Oijongbu

The bunkhouse is no better and no worse than he was expecting. A hastily erected corrugated iron shell of a thing, with rectangular bunks lining the walls and a long, thin table down the centre. Hawkeye dumps his regulation green dufflebag on the nearest unoccupied bunk and collapses moodily next to it. The dogtags clink against his chest as he moves, and almost unconsciously his fingers reach up to grasp at the cold weight. With a tentative thumb, he traces the graven letters. Capt. B. F. Pierce, and then a number. US12836413. He lets the tags drop, and they chime softly against his sternum.

"What the hell." he says to himself, and the words sound strange in his own ears, his voice still, but not his own any more. "What the hell." he says, more firmly. Then: "God, I need a drink."

It does not take him long to find the shabby airport bar, a ten-by-twenty rectangular slab without windows, and a door made of rough-hewn, untreated timber. There is a subdued cluster of Americans huddled around one of the three tables, which he avoids out of reflex. A slightly more vocal group surrounds the cheap jukebox in the corner, jabbering away in Korean, or Japanese, or Chinese, the hell he knows. Or cares. Just like any bar he's ever been in, anywhere else in the world. Except, he thinks, that every person in this bar is a marked man, and they all know it. What strikes him, very suddenly, is the absence of colour. Every man in the room is wearing a crisply starched new uniform, shiny boots, and enough brass to make a trumpet section. God, he needs that drink.

No... he reflects, after his third lukewarm, foreign-tasting beer. It is not the absence of colour, it is the weight of it. So much colour, and all of it the same. Official, sombre looking dark brown fatigues, the very weight of all that brown dragging him, and each and every one of them down into some nameless quagmire. War. His stomach churns, and he resists the urge to tear off every shred of uniform brown and run screaming back to the plane, right back to Crapapple Cove, back to when he was twelve years old and his Dad made him mugs of hot cocoa and read him "The Last of the Mohicans" before bed.

The group over by the bar shifts, and he hears a distinctive burst of ringing laughter, out of place and quickly stifled, catches a flash of gold beneath a tilted cap, an elegant hand drumming restless on the counter. For a long, long moment, Hawkeye simply stares. He hesitates, then downs his drink in one. What the hell, he thinks. He could use the laugh. Slides along the bar with the ease of long practise, leans a casual elbow upon the other's shoulder.

"Hello sailor." Whispers in a voice low and seductive. "Come here often?"

The shoulder stiffens beneath his arm, barely perceptibly. The head turns, shocked brown eyes meeting laughing blue. It is almost worth all the years of silence just to see the look on Trapper John's face.

"Hawk!" And then they are laughing. Wild, crazy, irrational laughter, arms tight about each other's necks, a fistful of golden curls in Hawkeye's hand.

"You crazy bastard!" the Hawk grins, when he has the breath to speak. "What in hell are you doing getting transferred here! Thought a guy like you had more brains."

Trapper shrugs, laughs, and nudges Hawkeye with a friendly fist. "What, and let you have all the fun? Wouldn't have missed it for the world."

It is sorted, in the end, with surprising ease. Trapper John, assigned to the 8063rd Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, merely trades some skilfully altered papers with a snoring chest surgeon from Nebraska, and he and Hawkeye climb together into a rusting tin can on wheels, flood the bathrooms at the Korean air base with saki as a parting gesture, write a few well-chosen comments in the visitor's book, and head off together in quest of one 4077th MASH.


	5. Welcome to Korea

In years afterwards, Henry Blake is fond of saying that they came over the hill without a bedpan to their name. He isn't wrong. To start with, a hatless, tieless, and fairly well intoxicated Hawkeye merely drives their purloined jeep around in increasingly desperate circles searching for the camp which ought to be there, but isn't. It takes several hefty shoves from a cheerfully sloshed Trapper John before Hawkeye even registers the appearance of a worried-looking gnome with round glasses and a clipboard, several more before he is persuaded that the diminutive figure is not a hallucination and brings the jeep to a superbly crashing halt .

There is a thud, and a muffled 'ow' from Trapper John, but there is a definite giggling sound emanating from beneath the front seat, so Hawkeye doesn't give it too much thought. The gnome, who upon closer inspection is wearing dog tags and army boots, still appears to be concerned about something, so Hawkeye does his best to reassure him.

"Isallright." He comforts, grinning in typical inane Hawkeye fashion. "I didn't let him drive. He's as drunk as a mongeese. Mongoose." The gnome, although up close he looks more like a leprechaun, doesn't seem all that reassured.

"Now look here, sir." he trembles, in a voice which he hopes sounds authoritative. "Who are you sir, if you don't mind me asking?" He does a slight double-take at the emergence of Trapper, who sits up, shakes his head, and confirms his partner's previous thought.

"Look Hawk, issa leprechaun," he manages, before subsiding into giggles again.

Hawkeye, deducing that he will receive no help from that quarter, dismounts deliberately from the jeep and with a supreme effort of will raises one arm into a Nazi salute.

"Pierce, M.D., Benjamin Franklin, Captain, Serial number US1283... I forget the rest."

Trapper giggles. Hawkeye collapses.


	6. I Think We're in the Army

Hawkeye and Trapper spend their first day at the four-oh-double-natural enjoying a pleasant, alcohol-induced coma in the back seat of their jeep. The diminutive Corporal, whose name proves to be Walter Eugene O'Reilly, tactfully refrains from informing the commanding officer of their arrival until seventeen hundred hours, by which time the twosome have recovered sufficiently to sit upright on the bonnet of the jeep imbibing vast quantities of black coffee, conjured up by the young Corporal in a tin billy over an open fire. The Corporal himself keeps up a constant stream of slightly nervous chatter to which Trapper responds in mono-syllables and Hawkeye tries not to listen.

By what the Corporal insists on referring to as seventeen hundred hours, though Trapper's watch says five o'clock, he and Hawkeye are feeling relatively chipper again, and Corporal Walter Eugene O'Reilly trots off with his clipboard and a worried frown around the corner of a half-erected tin shed which neither Trapper nor Hawkeye had noticed previously.

At this point, the Hawk attempts a discreet inquiry. "Where d'you reckon he's gone?" he asks, then pauses briefly to admire his own fairly remarkable level of coherrance.

"Probably to call the Police." Trapper answers, pouring the sadly lacking remains of a brandy bottle into his coffee mug.

A short while later, the Corporal reappears, followed by a middle-aged man sweating beneath an olive green uniform and Colonel's insignia, and wearing a somewhat incongruous hat decorated with what appear to be fishing flies.

"Ah," comments the Hawk, wisely. And then, noticing the hammer in the man's hand: "This must be the boss."

"Who in the hell are you two jokers?" the guy asks, looking positively terrified. From this, Hawkeye and Trapper deduce that he is not by nature a military man.

"Two new chest cutters, sir." says Walter Eugene O'Reilly, peeking out from behind his commander's jacket with an expression of almost identical terror.

"Hawkeye Pierce." says the Hawk, magnanimously, executing an masterful bow. "And this here's my caddy, the trusty Trapper John."

"Where'd you get a name like Hawkeye?" asks the Colonel, at the same time that his sidekick asks "Why Trapper John?"

Hawkeye waves an elegant hand. "We'll tell you when you're older, kid."

"Um." says the man with the fishing hat. And then: "I'm Colonel Blake."

"So where's this here camp where we're s'posed to be assigned to then?" asks Trapper John.

"You're standing in it."

The army, it emerges, overlooking the fact that some thirty-odd draftees need places to sleep, has not yet managed to supply the unit with tents. Corporal O'Reilly gives the two captains the grand tour, which takes all of about twelve minutes. There is a generator in a tin shed, a muddy creek, from whence a pump carries cold water to a stone sink, and a series of olive-green lorries filled with tinned spam, surgical equipment and toilet paper. Hawkeye and Trapper are introduced to the cesspool, two corpsmen named Goldman and Zale,a major with polished boots and no chin, and the first national latrine.

The tour culminates in the compound in front of the half-erected cattle shed, which Corporal O'Reilly proudly informs them is destined to become an office, admitting ward and post-op. Colonel Blake climbs down from his ladder long enough to have a mid-evening drink with his two new chest cutters, inform them that his name is Henry and he's left behind a wife, a private practise and three children in Bloomington, Illinois, and to confirm their previous opinion of him as a pretty good Joe. He then advises them to hit the sack, and climbs back up his ladder armed with a saw, a hammer, and a bucket of nails. As the only building actually completed is the operating room, it is currently serving double-duty as a bunkhouse for the tentless personnel. Hawkeye and Trapper grab a gurney each, take a medicinal shot of bourbon as a preventative measure, and proceed to follow Henry's advice.

Two days later, an American pilot hits a Korean schoolhouse, and the doctors of the 4077th have their first patients.


	7. The First Time

The first casualty of the 'Police Action' operated on by captains Pierce and McIntyre is a six year old Korean girl with a pound of shrapnel in her chest. It's strange, and a little frightening. The blood itself is nothing new to them, but the _quantity_ of it... Leaking out of the kid's chest and into Hawkeye's boots, while he grasps a spouting vessel in his fist and screams for clamps. No nurses have arrived yet, so it is Trapper who plunges a gloveless hand alongside Hawkeye's and staunches the blood flow while Hawkeye sutures. The lorries with their carefully stacked cardboard boxes of masks and gloves and white surgical scrubs cannot be accessed owing to a heavy barrage of mortar fire, so by the time they are finished, the red has soaked right through Trapper's sage green shirt, and Hawkeye has to shake the blood and sweat out of his eyes.

There are twelve children in the first batch, none of them older than fourteen. Henry Blake proves himself a competent and dedicated surgeon, though his hands shake as he reaches for the instruments, and there is undisguised panic in his pale blue eyes. The fourth surgeon, Major Burns, is shaking even worse than Henry, and goes to pieces completely over a little girl with dark pigtails. Henry tells them later that Major Burns is by nature a GP, with only the barest grasp of any surgery more complicated than lancing boils.

Hawkeye's patient goes into cardiac arrest, and he screams for adrenaline while Trapper turns over a box of instruments, and falls upon his knees, scrabbling though the cascade of steel for a heart needle. A shell whines overhead, and Trapper yells as his palm closes on a scalpel. There is an explosion, a flash of green and gold which shatters the newly laid windows, and shrapnel peppers the corrugated iron like hail. The kid dies.

The mortar barrage continues all night. The surgery continues until two in the morning. The personnel of the 4077th huddle at one end of the uncompleted post-op ward and stuff their ears against the shellfire. There is no food, as none of them particularly feels like crossing the compound to retrieve it, and without blankets or firewood their breath plumes, foggy, in the frigid air.

Trapper strips off his sodden shirt, and the hurricane lanterns flicker redly across his bare torso, goose-pimpled so that the brown nipples stick straight out, crimson-slick with blood.

"I liked you better off-white." says Hawkeye, into the flat silence. He tosses Trapper a ragged towel as inadequate as the jest, and Trapper half-laughs, but does not smile.

The surgeons sit propped against the shaking walls, with the blood drying dark on their cold skin, and share stories about parents, girls, kids back home. Scrub away tears with furtive, self-concious hands, and remember all the people who ever told them that big boys don't cry.


	8. A Swamp is Born

It is August before the Post Op and Admitting Ward are finished, September before the army finally gets around to delivering their tents. Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John discover very quickly that the army is incapable of supplying anything on time other than wounded. Of these, there are inordinate amounts. Corporal Walter Eugene O'Reilly becomes quickly adept at predicting these arrivals, and his warning cry of "Choppers!" becomes a daily mantra.

"I don't hear nothin'," says Trapper John, the first time he hears the call to arms.

"Wait for it," shouts O'Reilly, and there, sure enough, are the choppers, rising cumbersomely from behind the hills.

"I don't get it, kid," says Hawkeye. "How d'you do that? You sound like you're hiding a radar underneath that cap or something."

"I just know, sir," says the kid, and Trapper raises an eyebrow in disbelief, and grins:

"Sure thing, _Radar._"

When the tents and hospital equipment finally arrive, Hawkeye and Trapper purloin a mangy, four-square, olive-drab tent, and erect it in the centre of what they fondly term 'the compound.' Two hard army cots are procured, along with green sleeping bags, a stove, and several crates of beer. A sign which reads "Bussiness women welcome" is nailed to one side of the door, and a dartboard to the other. An hour later, Henry drops by with a third cot, and the command that Major Burns is now sharing their quarters. Hawkeye and Trapper object violently, having had two months experience of Frank's near-obsessive partriotsim, but they are overuled, and Frank is installed in the cleanest corner of bedbug city. Hawkeye christens the place 'The Swamp', in rememberance of his college living arrangements, and a second sign is added to the front door.

About midway through October, a green lorry trundles over the hill, carrying two hardcase anaesthesiologists: a black ball-player who names himself Oliver Harmon 'Spearchucker' Jones, and a yank with a cowboy hat and a bristling moustache, who Trapper takes offence to sharing a name with, and dubs 'Ugly John' as a means of differentiation. There is also a small but friendly contingent of soft personnel of the nursing persuasion, led by a brassy blonde regular-army major with boots almost as shiny as Frank's. Spearchucker Jones quickly establishes himself as a better surgeon than Frank, though the jackass American army won't let a black opperate for fear of offending someone. Hawkeye claims that all the patients he knows would rather be offended than dead, and, much to Frank's chagrin, promotes Spearchucker in a drunken ceremony during which he is run up the basketball pole in a wheelchair and knighted by Henry with a swizzle stick. The nurses are welcomed with delight, and a celebratory party thrown in the newly christened Swamp, at which the last bottle of civilian booze is drunk with much ceremony.

Awaking the next day, and needing a drink, Hawkeye gets hold of Radar, and sets about the monumental task of requesitioning the equipment needed to construct a distillery.


	9. Happy Days

Happy hour in the Swamp. About seven o'clock in the evening, a warm, airless summer night. The sun retreating slowly behind the western hills, the rumble of artillery now barely audible as the day's destruction fades beneath a gin-induced haze. The still, their shrine bubbling contentedly between the bunks, a song distorted by static playing over the PA system. Fred Astaire, 'The way you look tonight', for the hundred and twenty sixth time. Spearchucker and Ginger playing poker with the Father; Henry debating with Klinger the various merits of blue silk or pink chiffon while Radar bobs ever-present at his elbow. Captain Spalding curled on Hawkeye's bunk with his guitar, surgeon's hands caressing the varnished black-gold body as if it were a woman's. And them. Two men in crumpled army jackets, heads inclined somewhere between laughter and sincerity as they dance. One tall and fair, the other dark and slight, stepping lightly in their socks with holes in the toes, though it's impossible to tell who is leading. The song ends, and Trapper dips Hawkeye backwards as the others laugh, the audience in this strange play.

"Kiss me, you fool!"

And Hawkeye grins, and kisses him full on the mouth until Trapper bursts out laughing and releases him with a gentle punch in the ribs.

"Hey, Nancy was right, you do give a great tonsillectomy!" and grins so that his eyebrows quirk upwards and the corners of his mouth twitch.

"Degenerates." Frank's token objection muttered from the corner with his bible. The doctors turn towards him and smile fondly with heads cocked to either side, gently patronising as adults to an uncomprehending child.

"Are you kidding?" Nancy twinkles, slipping past to reach the still. "I don't kiss and tell."

"Well then I'll have to settle for just the first half." And Trapper winks, and drops his partner's hand, lithe brown arms snaking about the nurse's waist.

She kisses him, and the Hawk shoots them a look of mock affront until he notices Margie slipping in through the door.

"Hello doctor darling!" she whispers, sliding her arm through his and standing on tiptoe to kiss him.

Happy hour in the swamp. The warmth slips away softly with the sunset, and the first stars appear. 'Happy days' is playing on the PA. Behind the hills, the artillery rumbles on.


	10. O, Tokyo!

**Author's Note:** My extreme apologies to those of you who care about such things for the incredible lack of updates. In my own defence, I have written a lot of chapters... just not those which come next in the chronological sequence! I've been playing around with things so far, and basically making stuff up, but if any of you have a favourite episode from seasons 1-3 which you'd like to see, please tell me:-) Anyways, enojy!

Tokyo, Japan. Land of the rising sun and the all-night bath house. Or in Hawkeye's words, Land of the hedonistic Gods. The draftees of the American armed services very quickly learn not to underestimate the pleasure which can be derived from a hotel with real beds, and a bar with real alcohol. That first, crazy trip is the one which remains in Hawkeye's memory. A medical conference, he thinks. If so, he doesn't remember it. That bit is unimportant. What he does remember is Henry, dancing with a lampshade on his head, and Trapper sitting on the roof of the hotel stark naked, and singing. He remembers trying to swim in the Emperor's moat, racing in and out of hotel rooms with Trapper, making a game of it, trying to catch General McArthur in the act.

He remembers, at oh-five-hundred in the morning, falling through the door of Mrs Lee's take-away and whoopee parlour with Trapper and Henry, wearing nothing but papa-san hats and bathrobes. He can never remember where the bathrobes came from, only that Henry's was pale ice-blue, that Trapper's was golden yellow, and his red, like blood.

There, in Tokyo, the days seemed to stretch, hour upon golden hour. Days become nights, become days without end, and sleep, though absent, is not mourned. That first visit, even now, is infinite, a slender-spun haze no different from any other, and yet memorable because of that.

There was a two-star General with a corncob pipe, and Trapper flirting outrageously at him across the table, his long lashes fluttering, laughter concealed beneath the sensual whisper of his voice. For once, Hawkeye played the straight man, offering the General, with all the sobriety he could muster, the chance to partake of Trapper's dubious virtues for a mere $3.20, while Henry leaned heavily on the doorway, giggling in terror of retribution. There was a crazy, pinwheeling ride in a hijacked rickshaw, and an incensed Japanese driver chasing after them in silk slippers. There was a city, neon-lit in gorgeous decadence, the lights so bright as to make the night another day. There were street vendors selling strange foods that none of them knew the names of, but which they ate anyway - hot, aromatic things, every mouthful an adventure in itself. There was a bath-house, and kimono-clad girls with faces painted garishly, American-fashion, in strange, unsettling contrast to the demure little smiles and rustling paper fans.

Then there was Friday, and a dusty chopper waiting by the pad. Tokyo, falling away beneath them, a one-way ticket back to hell, and boots filled anew with blood.


	11. For Which We Give Thanks

**Author's Note:** Goly gosh, it has been FOREVER! I had a couple of pieces I wanted to write in between these two, hence the delay, but I couldn't get my brain round to it somehow, so I've decided to fit them in later somewhere. I should warn you all that this particular chapter is the tiniest bit slashy, but it's nothing explicit, and you may read it howsoever you choose. :-)

* * *

It is winter, 1950, the first annual 4077th Thanksgiving dress up party, and the surgeons have banded together to contribute a pantheon of Greek gods to the proceedings. Hawkeye's duties as chief surgeon being minimal at present, it is he who is left in charge of the minor details. Henry is easily settled as Neptune, a trident and fishing net being slightly more obtainable than an eagle and a thunderbolt. Hawkeye has, in a stroke of his usual brilliance, cast himself as the wine-god Dionysus, thus ensuring that the continuous flow of his favourite elixir is entirely justified. For a mischievous moment, he toys with the idea of Margaret as Aphrodite, emerging pink and seductive from the sea, but is forced to regretfully abandon this concept when her combination of outraged screeches and hurling of slippers threaten to bring down upon his head the greater power of General Clayton. He takes a certain delight in pronouncing to Frank that he is the perfect Haephestos, hurled form Olympus as a baby for his ugliness, but he does not trust Frank with a suture, let alone a heavy smith's mallet, and he tires of Frank's blustering protests, so dismisses the idea.

Trapper, Hawkeye finds, is not so easy to place. He could be Apollo, with the slender surgeon's hands and golden curls, though he admittedly has no lyre, only a beaten-up guitar. He could be the fleet-footed thief Mercury, mischief incarnate, quicksilver and laughter, but somehow that is not right either. He considers for a moment casting Trapper as one of the warriors, but he is neither a Hercules nor an Achilles. He could be Hector or Patroclus perhaps, but something in him baulks at the idea of Trapper wielding a sword. Finally, he has it. Eros. Not the chubby, fluttering cupid of Rome, but the ancient spirit of love, slender and lithe, wildly, frighteningly beautiful. Raw physicality and violent passion, gaunt waist and narrow jutting hips, all hard muscle, bone and sharp angles... Dangerous... yes... But this is Hawkeye, and there is a strange allure in the danger, a potency which he has always been powerless to resist.

Trapper grumbles and moans about having to wear a loincloth in the middle of a Korean winter, but Hawkeye is insistent. He himself is resplendent in purple toga and sandals, garlanded with the closest Korea can come to vine leaves, bottle in hand, and lecherous grin firmly in place. Henry's borrowed garden fork is a sad excuse for a trident, but the precarious rhinestone in his belly-button more than makes up for it. Spearchucker declines the chance to, as he puts it, "freeze his buns off," instead opting for a rather unexciting, but undoubtedly warmer striped poncho. Ginger is stunning in flowing black and gold as a courtesan, Zale a somewhat unimaginative football player, Jukebox Spalding a dashing mobster with felt hat and cigar. Klinger is a true confection of white gauze and silk as Marilyn Monroe, Hotlips a revelation as General McArthur, Igor a scrawny, long-legged Superman. Radar, for some reason best known to himself, attempts an imitation of what appears to be a Christmas tree, while Margie, Nancy, and Barbara are Bo Peep, Goldilocks, and Red Riding Hood respectively. Frank, with some slight coercion, is forced to attend dressed in a cardboard box which Captains Pierce and McIntyre take the sensible precaution of lashing to the central pole in the mess tent.

At a quarter past drunken five, there are few survivors. The gods of sex and alcohol weave their staggering way swampwards, bereft now of both bow and bottle, leaning a little too heavily upon each other's shoulders. Blood rises, hot and enticing, alcohol fueling the fire. Through a shifting haze, Hawkeye sees Trapper's eyes, glassy and unfocused, feels the stale, gin-sweet breath, staggers beneath the weight as Trapper collapses earthwards, sprawls upon the dirt floors where he watches, mesmerised, the bare lightbulb swinging on its roped orbit above his head, hears the scratching of the gramophone needle as the table turns, around, and around... He wakes in a tangle of limbs and discarded beer cans, to find his head resting on the muddy floor, dusty golden curls sharing the same pillow.


	12. I'll Be Home For Christmas

**Author's Note:** Quite a long one this time, I'm afraid. Some of you may have read this before, as I've done a bit of re-shuffling in order to put my thanksgiving before my Christmas! If so, then the new chapter you're actually looking for is the one before this! :-P Sorry for confusing you all!

* * *

December 1950, and General Douglas MacArthur has promised them that they'll be home by Christmas. Trapper McIntyre sits with a small Korean kid in his lap, watches the others playing with their new toys. Scrawny orphans, cheerful as sparrows. Margie and Ginger with shining fistfuls of candy, Henry Blake cooing over a tiny baby, her bright eyes following the straw doll in his hand. She reaches for the toy with chubby fists, bites delicately on the painted arm, gazes at Henry with solemn eyes. The kid wraps scrawny arms around his neck, and Trapper is startled by the strange sensation of a soft cheek pressed close against his own, little, clutching fingers twining in his curls, the fresh, warm, baby-powder scent. He plants a clumsy kiss upon the squirming bundle, looks up quickly, embarrassed, in case any of the others have seen. Major Houllihan pauses across the compound, an orphan swinging on each arm, her hair loosed from its practical tie and curling in pale tendrils about her face. There is a strange, almost tender look in her eyes as she watches him, though when she notices Trapper's eyes she glances away hurriedly. "Want to play happy families, Major?" he grins cheerily, and is rewarded with a scandalised glare. He waits until he is sure that the Major is out of sight before he lets himself lift the kid again in his arms,and press his closed eyes tight into the kid's shoulder, stroke the hair, dark and straight and shiny, not curling and golden like his baby's.

_In a small, bright kitchen in Boston, Massachusetts, Becky McIntyre reaches for a cookie cutter, stamps out the shape of a Christmas tree, looks up at her mother with Trapper's eyes. "That's perfect, Freckles." Louise smiles with false cheerfulness. "How about a star next?" "But I'm using the star." Kathy, clamouring for attention through a mouthful of dough, waves the cutter with sticky fingers as proof. "Stars are Daddy's favourite." "You don't know that!" Becky, accusing. "You just made that up!" And Kathy glares at her with a scowl just like Trapper's. "Your Daddy likes all kinds of gingerbread." Lousie tells them firmly. "We'll send him some. Becky, get some currants from the cupboard and we'll decorate them." Becky scrabbles for a chair, climbs up it like a monkey to find the little cardboard packet. "Here!" And Louise opens the packet, picks a single currant, and pops it in her mouth. Winks at the girls' petulant faces. They hesitate, then smile with their identical smiles like John's, and reach for the currants with deft little fingers. Lousie watches with a strange tightness in her throat, and her eyes sting from the heat of the oven. _

Hawkeye scrabbles in the mud with his free hand, searching for the dropped needle. A shell whines overhead, and he crashes forward, shielding his patient with his own body. The corporal's face is unmoving as the mortar fragments rain down, peppering the already soiled fatigues with mud. A soldier half-scrambles, half-falls over the edge of the foxhole and lies without moving. "Forget him!" Hawkeye yells to the filthy private who crawls from the murky haze towards the fallen body. "Forget him! Get me some alcohol! In the bag." The private rolls aside as another shell explodes, tosses Hawkeye an unlabeled bottle. Holding the bottle in his teeth, Hawkeye unscrews it with the hand which isn't currently going steady with the corporal's pulmonary artery. A brief sniff informs his that it is almost pure ethanol. Without ceremony, he splashes the alcohol into the gaping chest, and his patient buckles, writhing and gasping in agony. The Hawk grasps the reclaimed needle between his teeth and splashes the remains of the bottle over it. A fair portion finds his mouth, and the front of his red Santa suit, but the needle is at least sterile. He hopes. A ricochet of explosions from the North, the ground shudders, and Hawkeye slips face forwards into the dirt miraculously maintaining his grip on both the needle, and the corporal's partially-severed artery. "Can't you idiots knock it off?" he yells to the war in general, spitting through a mouthful of sodden Father Christmas beard, before plunging back into his patient's chest.

_Daniel lifts the sherry glass slowly as the lights of the Christmas tree twinkle, reflected in the mirror-world of the black window. He watches, almost without seeing, the room lit with a warm golden glow of firelight, the surfaces bristling with holly and pine boughs. Most of Crabapple Cove seems to have accumulated in the room, and the old house rings with laughter. He remembers, on Christmas eves of a thousand years ago, wading through the snowy wood with an axe over one shoulder, his son's small, gloved hand tight within the security of his own. Hawk would always chose the tallest tree that he could find. He remembers decorating it, lifting his baby boy to place the star on the very top, until Hawkeye grew tall enough to do it himself, and Dan grew too old to lift him anyway. Dickie Barber cranks up the old gramophone, and they all stand to listen as the soft strains of Silent Night chime forth. Dan rests his (now empty anyway) glass on the windowsill, and bows elegantly, offering Molly Gillis his arm. With a quiet nod, she accepts, and they smile through their tears, and dance, because when the young folks are gone (and maybe never coming home), there's not a damn thing you can do but keep on dancing._


End file.
